Authors: Donna Andrews
“Very odd,” Caroline said. “Look more closely to see if any of the landscapes have policemen in them.”
Looking closely took a while. I’d peered at every tiny little human figure in half a dozen paintings before enlightenment dawned. I straightened up.
“This,” I announced. “Is a Turner. I remember it from art appreciation class. I didn’t quite sleep through the whole lecture on eighteenth-century English painters.”
“Does it have a policeman in it?” Caroline asked. She scurried over and began peering at the Turner.
“No, it’s a landscape,” I said. “Turner was noted for his landscapes.”
“If he doesn’t paint policemen, I don’t care what he’s noted for,” she said. “Find me a policeman.”
“Noted for his landscapes,” I repeated. “So was Constable. John Constable, Turner’s fellow landscape artist.”
Caroline straightened up and frowned at me.
“Come to think of it, Ekaterina probably did say constable,” she said. “She learned her English from the BBC before she moved here. Uses a lot of Anglicisms. I just thought this was another of them. So which one is the Constable?”
“Damned if I know,” I said. “All those eighteenth-century British landscapes look alike to me. And none of them seemed to have signed their work. Ekaterina must be an unusually literate maid.”
“She’s working her way through grad school,” Caroline said. “I suppose we’ll have to check under all the paintings.”
“You take the left side,” I said. “I’ll take the right.”
It took another ten minutes and another rush to hide, this time in the ice/vending room.
“In the unlikely event that we ever burgle the Inn again,” I said, as I fumbled at yet another spot on the baseboard, “let’s ask Ekaterina for a better dead drop.”
“This was a better dead drop than her first idea,” Caroline said. “She wanted to leave the key card inside a rat.”
“A rat? Like a dead rat?”
“Freeze-dried, actually,” Caroline said, with a grimace. Rats, apparently, were one of the few inhabitants of the animal kingdom that hadn’t won her heart. “Standard CIA issue, according to her. Her father and his handler used to exchange messages that way all the time.”
“What do you do with it once you’ve put the message in it?” I asked.
“Leave it on a street corner, I suppose.” Caroline shrugged. “The idea is that no one but the intended recipient would pick up a dead rat.”
“Wouldn’t that make the spies rather conspicuous, then?” I suggested. “Going around picking up dead rats all the time. ‘Oh, look, Boris! That man over there is picking up the dead rat! Must be another CIA operative!’”
“It’s no stranger than the exploding cigar story,” Caroline said. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Ekaterina believes it. The only way I could talk her out of the idea was to point out that neither of us happened to have a dead rat available for freeze-drying, and as an animal lover I could never condone killing one on purpose. Aha! This must be it!”
She waved the key card in triumph.
We returned to room 212. There was a D
O
N
OT
D
ISTURB
sign on the door. I grabbed Caroline’s arm as she was about to use the key card.
“What if he’s here?” I pointed at the sign.
“I asked Ekaterina to do that.” She gently shook off my hand and reached to insert the card in the reader. “I thought it would be better if we could see the room just as he left it.”
I had a sudden, vivid image of Denton’s body sprawled on the floor of the room in the same awkward pose in which we’d found Colleen Brown.
“Let me go first,” I said.
Maybe Caroline had the same vision, because she made no protest as I took the key card out of her hand.
I stepped up to the door and knocked.
“Mr. Denton?” I kept both voice and knock low, designed to be heard inside the room, not up and down the hall by any fellow guests who happened to be in their rooms. I knocked a second time, then, after listening at the door for a few more moments, I dipped the key card in the slot, opened the door, and stepped inside the room.
Chapter 26
The room was empty. Empty, at least, of humans, living or dead. Apparently I wasn’t developing psychic powers after all, just an overactive imagination.
It wasn’t my imagination that Caroline also breathed a sigh of relief.
“Well,” she said, as she looked around. “It’s certainly not the Washington Cottage.”
Actually, Denton’s room in the Annex wasn’t bad at all. The ceilings were normal height; the furniture was nice but didn’t look as if it belonged in a museum; and best of all, there wasn’t a scrap of chintz in sight. Lots of tweed. The huge reproductions of landscapes had given way to reproductions of antique botanical prints. I had the feeling if I were one of the maids or nannies I’d probably breathe a sigh of relief when the end of the day arrived and I could flee the expensive, impeccable, and overwhelming halls of the main wings for the more plebian yet cozier comfort of the Annex. I shut the door behind us, and Caroline and I both relaxed slightly at having put a barrier between us and any onlookers. Well, I did. Caroline was looking around in her sharp, birdlike way.
“Not too bad,” she said. “Now what are we looking for?”
“You’re the one who arranged the key,” I said. “What did you plan on looking for?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “That’s why I also arranged you. Use that brain Monty keeps bragging you inherited from him and figure out what we need to find.”
“Like pornography, I will know it when I see it,” I said.
I was looking out the window. Carefully, at first, since the curtains were open, and I had no idea if there was anyone outside to see me.
Clearly Denton had not found favor with the management. His room looked down on the loading dock and its concrete apron lined with Dumpsters. Though if you kept your eyes elevated, you could gaze out at a small copse of trees that shielded the loading dock from the view of any golfers on the course. You could even catch a glimpse of one of the greens.
A lesser hotel might have advertised this as a room with a balcony, since the window was actually a sliding glass door—clearly added during a modern remodel—with a foot-wide ledge outside. The ledge was fitted with a nice, sturdy waist-high railing to keep the guests from plunging down to the concrete if they had any momentary lapses of memory and thought they were in a room classy enough to have a full-sized balcony. The ledge extended beyond the window on either side, and each end was decorated with a large clay pot containing bright purple petunias.
I glanced up and down the side of the annex. I saw no other curtains open and no one leaning on their railings to take the air—not that the air would be all that delightful this close to the Dumpsters baking in the July heat. And even if the distant golfers took a break from their game to look our way, the distance and the glare would keep them from seeing what we were up to, so I left the curtains open.
“Leave the lights off,” I said. “And let’s start with a general search, paying particular attention to any interesting papers we find.”
“Good thinking,” she said. “Here.”
She handed me a three-inch by four-inch plastic zip bag marked E
XAM GLOVES: 2 LATEX-FREE, LARGE, POWDER-FREE VINYL EXAM GLOVES.
Dad kept dozens of these in his doctor’s bag. I wonder if Caroline had raided her own first aid kit or if Dad had helped provision our expedition.
I pulled the gloves on, pocketed the little bag, and began my search.
Luckily Denton appeared to be a light packer, which would make our search a little easier. His empty suitcase was in the closet, along with a sports jacket, several pairs of pants, and a couple of shirts. They filled the closet—an incredibly tiny closet for a hotel room. Presumably maids and nannies weren’t expected to bring extensive wardrobes. Denton’s shaving kit sat on the bathroom counter, and the few toiletries not inside it were arranged neatly on the counter.
“Tidy, for a man,” Caroline said.
“Unless the maids have tidied up after him,” I said.
“No.” Caroline shook her head. “I thought we’d want to see it just as he left it, so I had Ekaterina put it at the end of her schedule. So it’s him who’s neat.”
“Or he hasn’t been home since they cleaned yesterday. The bed’s still made.”
“Some people do make their beds, you know,” she said.
“In a hotel? Not many. He travels light, doesn’t he?”
Caroline gave a last look around and abandoned the bathroom. I poked around for a few more minutes, but I had to admit that if there was something to be found, it would take a more expert hunter than me.
“This armoire is locked!” Caroline called out.
I stepped out of the bathroom to find her rattling the armoire’s doors vigorously, as if she hoped to shake them open.
“Don’t get too excited,” I said. “The key’s sitting right there on the dresser.”
I found only the usual Bible and stationery in the bedside drawer, so I went over to see what Caroline had found in the armoire. A modest TV with two drawers underneath filled the right side while the left offered more hanging space to make up for the small size of the closet. Denton hadn’t needed the overflow. He’d stashed his socks and underwear in the top drawer. The second one contained a laptop and a small collection of papers.
“Bingo!” Caroline said. “You boot up the laptop; I’ll start photographing these.”
She set the papers on top of the desk and pulled out a small digital camera. I brought the laptop over and set it beside the papers.
“Here,” I said, as I hit the laptop’s power switch. “You watch this while it boots. I can take the photos for a while. I’m tall enough to get a better angle anyway.” I also knew, from seeing the fuzzy, crooked pictures she took of the animals at the Willner Wildlife Sanctuary that Caroline was a singularly inept digital photographer, and while my shots of the boys might not be award winners, they were at least in focus more often than not.
“Thank you, dearie,” Caroline said.
I concentrated on getting good, sharp shots of Denton’s papers, but I scanned them as I worked, and I wasn’t spotting any earth-shattering new information. I found three weekly progress reports, addressed to Mr. Leonard Fisher of First Progressive Financial, the last one dated three days ago. Not exactly page turners—mostly they were long lists of the people he’d interviewed and the tiny scraps of information he gained from them.
“Not making much progress, is he?” Caroline said, when I’d finished photographing the last of the reports.
“Don’t gloat,” I said. “Neither are we.”
“At least he does appear to be doing what he said he was doing,” she said. “Trying to find out how Mr. Throckmorton has been getting his supplies.”
“I don’t like how much energy he spends asking about secret passages,” I said. “And looking for them.”
“Looking inside the courthouse,” Caroline said. “He won’t find anything like that inside the parts of the courthouse he can reach. Speaking of not finding things—your PI fellow has a password on his laptop. We’re not going to find out much information from it unless you can guess what it is.”
“Then we won’t find out much from it,” I said. “Because I haven’t a clue what he’d use as a password. Get Rob to find you a hacker with a password cracking program.”
“Okay,” she said. “If you won’t even bother to try, I’ll turn it off and see if I can fit it in my purse. Then—”
“We are not taking that laptop with us,” I said. “You snuck in once with me, you can sneak in again with Rob’s hacker, once he finds you one.”
I could tell she was about to argue with me, but just then someone knocked on the door.
“Denton!” a male voice said. “Are you in there?”
Caroline and I froze. Then she scrambled toward the armoire.
“Lock me in,” she whispered. “And then you can get out through the window.”
“They probably won’t come in,” I whispered back. “And if they do, then they’re burgling the place, just like us, and the armoire is the first place they’ll look. We’ll both just have to go out the window.”
“What about the laptop? And the papers? We—”
“Leave them!” I whispered. “Let’s move!”
“Denton?” The man outside knocked again. And he was using the same discreetly low voice and firm but soft knock I’d used.
“There’s no one there,” another voice said. “Shut up and hurry up.”
“Quick!” the first voice said. “Someone’s coming.”
The door didn’t pop open immediately, which probably meant that this new set of burglars was hiding from someone passing by, just as Caroline and I had.
Thank goodness for passersby. Meanwhile, we’d reached the window. I looked down. We were only on the second floor, but the ground sloped down behind the hotel, and it was at least a two-story jump to the concrete loading dock below.
I pulled the sliding glass door open and grabbed the left curtain to pull it closed.
“Grab the other side,” I whispered. I was moving the potted petunias so they were in front of the window, leaving the less visible ends of the ledge for us. “Pull it closed. And then take the other end of the ledge.”
“We shouldn’t jump?” Caroline whispered.
“They’d hear the sound of our bodies going splat on the loading dock,” I whispered back. “This is the best we can do.”
I backed out onto the ledge and then stepped sideways over the petunias. It wasn’t easy to wedge myself into the narrow space between the railing and the side of the hotel. I suddenly wondered if Caroline could do it.
Caroline grabbed the other side of the curtain, pulled it closed, and then began trying to squeeze into her end of the balcony. After a few fruitless attempts to wedge herself in, she used the petunia pot to give her a leg up and sat on the railing with her rump hanging over the outside. I suspected her perch felt as precarious as it looked and wondered, for a moment, if the ledge and the railing were really designed to hold this much weight.
I thought of closing the sliding glass door, but before I could do it, we heard the door opening.
The carpet underfoot muffled the intruders’ footsteps—that and the wool curtain between us and them—but we heard the door close again.